SUMMARY The Medicinal Chemistry Core (MCC) is the central focus of the translational research for all our drug discovery programs and will play a critical role in determining the early lead, late lead and preclinical candidates. Our MCC is a well-established unit, with a team of high experienced experts from industry and academics, which specializes in discovering and optimizing first-in-class agents against novel targets with a wide variety of academic and industrial partners. MCC has played a key role towards obtaining a number of preclinical candidates which, in turn, have been progressed to several IND enabling studies. While MCC (Core B) will provide medicinal chemistry services for optimizing hits and leads, ADME/Formulation Core (Core C) will facilitate ADME profiling for assessing the drug-like properties of the CAMPP direct acting broad spectrum antiviral compounds described in all the projects. The MCC will perform synthetic chemistry (small scale for in vitro work and larger scale for non-GLP animal studies), structure-activity relationship analysis capabilities (SAR), lead optimization (Lead-op), scale-up, tool and custom compound synthesis, structural modification to improve ADME and PK profile, and structure-based drug design and machine learning (with the help of Structural and Model Core E). In addition to providing synthesis of key analogs, the expert staff of the core will contribute their medicinal chemistry and pharmacology expertise to drive compound optimization efforts and in vivo efficacy studies. MCC will enable the drug discovery by taking hits through hit-to-lead (H2L) stage and then lead optimization (LeadOP) followed by preclinical candidate development (PCC and PCD) and IND enabling studies needed to examine the drug in first-in-human (FIH) studies. MCC (Core B) with collaborate with ADME/Formulation Core (Core C) for in vivo pharmacokinetic/ and tox studies followed by its integration with Animal and Organoid Model Core (Core D) to determine the pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) relationship of compounds which will be used in an iterative cycle of improved drug design and testing. MCC will work with project, core leaders and executive committee to decide the transition from one stage to another.